"B.C. Policy Perspectives" is the web log of Mark Crawford. THE PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG IS NOT PARTISAN OR IDEOLOGICAL. INSTEAD, I TRY TO IDENTIFY POSITIONS AND PERSPECTIVES THAT ARE NEGLECTED, DROWNED OUT OR UNDERREPRESENTED ELSEWHERE. Some politicians and journalists have found it helpful and interesting, and I hope that you do, too!
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Wednesday, October 28, 2015

On the whole, the October 19 election was a good day for
democracy. I had feared—more than once in these columns—what a re-elected
Conservative Harper majority might mean in terms of creating a “new normal”.
Instead, we had a 7% increase in national voter turnout, and a government with
more women and aboriginal people than ever before. The Liberals won by having
an optimistic and upbeat leader whoseemed to embody “Real Change” . The Opposition is strong, and , aside
from the complete Liberal monopoly of Atlantic Canada,each of the major political parties is
well-represented throughout most of the country.

Of course, electing the country's first NDP government, with proportional representation, Senate Abolition and a million daycare spaces on the policy docket, looks more like "Real Change" to me. But elections are about politics, not policy.

Let's not forget that the Conservatives, the NDP and the Media all unwittingly conspired to give Mr. Trudeau his Golden Opportunity. The Conservatives, whose extra-long campaign made people forget about C-51 and the Senate Scandal , but which also made people forget about Trudeau's poor performance on those issues and Mulcair's strong performance; the NDP , by weakening its Quebec base and then taking its balanced-budget theme too far, creating more policy space for Trudeau; the media, in particular the Globe and Mail and the Munk Centre, who could have crowded the stage by adding Elizabeth May and GIlles Duceppe to the mix but instead gave Trudeau tons of visibility.

One sad feature of the election was that, all too often, so-called “strategic
voting” just gave way to a blind,
convulsive bandwagon effect, of course amplified by our first past the post
electoral system.Cariboo-Prince George
is a case in point. Voter turnout in 2015 was 53,590 or 68,9% of the
electorate--- an increase of over 10,000 votes or nearly 11% higher than in 2011.This was clearly a determined vote for “change” , since the Conservative
share of the totaldropped from 24,324
to just 19, 668 votes—a loss ofnearly
20%.So why weren’t the other 63.3% of local
voters able to dislodge them?

A week before the election, LeadNow, a national organization
dedicated to coordinating the efforts of all “progressives”, released a local
Environics poll showingthe NDP’s Trent Derrick was in the lead with 36% of the
vote, the Conservatives’ Todd Doherty well behind at 30% , the Liberals’ Tracy Calogheros
running third at 29% and the Greens polling at 5%. Accordingly, LeadNow
recommended to local progressives desiring a change to unite behind the NDP
candidate.Edmonton - Griesbach was another perfect example. Janis Irwin of the NDP had long been in the lead locally and was seen as being the NDP's second-strongest riding in Alberta. A creditable survey of 509 people , considered accurate within 4 percentage points, was published on August 19. It showed Irwin to be in the lead with 48% of decided voters(!), Kerry Diotte of the Conservatives well behind at 32%, and Liberal Brian Gold third at only 15% of local voters. Liberals were being urged to do their bit and hold their noses and vote NDP in order to "heave Steve". But a problem for the NDP was that 60% of those surveyed said they would be willing to vote differently in order to defeat the Conservatives. As the Liberal surge began to wash across the country in October , many of those ABC voters, either indifferent or ignorant of local circumstances and conditions, began falling off the fence and voting Liberal (in effect, pinning their tail on the wrong donkey because it appeared to be the right donkey nationally). The final result: Irwin got an unexpectedly low 34.04%; Gold got an unexpectedly high 21.67%, and Diotte won with 39.91% of the vote. Conservatives deserve some credit for getting their vote out and perhaps for persuading a large chunk of the 11% who were undecideds, but it was that vote-splitting defection from the NDP to the Liberals that sealed their victory.

The problem was that a lot of people were watching what was
happeningnationally and decided to climb
on the Liberal bandwagon. In those
constituencies where the Liberal base was already big enough, (e.g Edmonton Centre, Vancouver Granville) that switch managed to
elect a Liberal MP. But inseveral constituencies in western
Canada,the Liberal wave had the
opposite, unintended effect: of splitting the vote and electing a Conservative
MP instead. In Cariboo-Prince George, Todd Doherty was the
beneficiary of that vote-splitting. In Edmonton-Griesbach, it was Kerry Diotte.

On the whole, however, it was still a good day. I look forward to
Canada presenting a fresh face to the world , at the U.N. and at the Paris
Climate Conference. I wouldn’t be surprised if, when being introduced in Paris,
Justin Trudeau received an ovation…just
for not being Stephen Harper.But for me the big lesson to take away from this election was that given the difficulties of information sharing and voter coordination in the context of increasing electoral volatility, in the end there is really no alternative to electoral reform, and despite what the prime minister seems to think, that means some degree or kind of proportional representation (PR). While many arguments can be marshaled against PR, nearly all can be met to a large extent through modifications of the PR formulae. So please, let's do it.

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On Knowing (1)

"The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it." ---David Hume

On Knowing (2)

"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."--- Arthur Schopenhauer

On Knowing (3)

"There is no a priori reason for thinking that the truth, once discovered, will necessarily prove interesting."---C.I. Lewis